Martini

by Frank Moorhouse

  Len says that nitrogen acts as an anaesthetic which can have an intoxicating effect. Martini’s Law states that every fifteen metres of diving is equal to the effect of one martini. Divers experience ‘a feeling of stimulation, excitement and euphoria, occasionally accompanied by laughter and loquacity’.

  Sometimes the diver does not wish to return to the surface and sometimes doesn’t.

  Sounds very much like some martini drinkers I know.

  I rang Voltz from the ship at twelve dollars a minute and told him this important information.

  Voltz said, ‘At four martinis I feel as if I am sixty metres below life. And I aways wish to stay there.’

  Mademoiselle and the Doctor and the Martini

  I saw a documentary (Mademoiselle and the Doctor made by Janine Hosking, 2005) about an eighty-year-old French woman, Lisette Nigot, who planned to suicide at eighty because she felt her life was completed; she had no reason to get up in the morning. She denied loneliness or ill health and spoke with good humour as she explained her intentions.

  She talked to a doctor about the final alcoholic drink she would have with her suicide drugs and said she had chosen vodka with fruit juice because it would make the drugs she was to use more palatable.

  But, she said, gin was her favourite drink and then her face was lit with a very special kind of smile filled with memories and connection and she said, ‘Best of all I like a dry martini.’ It was a love of the life attitude that the martini suggested to her. She felt that the martini would be spoiled if mixed with the drugs.

  Shortly after this interview she did suicide.

  The Cocktail Dress

  It’s OK to wear your cocktail dress – the little black dress or a sheath dress – on to dinner after the cocktail hour. No need to change.

  The cocktail dress should be made from one of the lightweight sensual fabrics – satin, silk, velvet – and can be embroidered and trimmed. Underwear should harmonise. We wear our newer, more sexy underwear and we use our Other Perfume and change our jewellery to the more precious or least worn.

  Women’s evening clothing especially is designed to make ‘windows to the body’. According to fashion, it can be the breast cleavage, the legs revealed as high as you wish, shoulders, the back as low as you dare, the hint of buttock cleavage, and arms and armpits revealed according to taste. The ankle as a point of revelation has been lost to us as the hemline of dresses has permanently risen, although I can imagine a return to ankle-length skirts and dresses – the Muslim Look? I am doubtful about the exposed belly and navel at cocktails. There is a certain beach casualness to this look. Voltz agrees.

  I could make an exception about the exposed belly if the dress was made by Geoffrey Beene. In the autumn of 1996 in New York, he made an evening gown from silver panne velvet, which if I remember it correctly, had ‘breast plates’, two silver rectangles joined at the neck, then parting and spreading over the breasts. Silver cord secured the material under the breasts, crossed at the back and then at the exposed navel. The back too was bare to the cleavage of the buttocks, except for thin silver straps coming from the neck crossing mid-back and then continuing around to the front to connect to the breast plates.

  Men should change into a tux (worn originally at the Tuxedo Club in New York during the late 19th Century and copied from a similar male jacket being worn at the time in Europe). In the UK it is known as ‘black tie’, and the French call it a ‘smoking’. The tux can be worn after six pm. The word tuxedo seems to be an Algonquin word for the land around where Tuxedo Park now is.

  Voltz and I favour silk lapels.

  The Whole Question of the Drinks’ Cart

  There is the public or club cocktail bar and there is drinking at home. The biggest argument Voltz and I have had is over the question of the drinks’ cart (or as I prefer, ‘trolley’).

  It happened this way.

  ‘Stainless steel cocktail shakers are to be preferred,’ Voltz stated, ‘because they get much colder than glass, but it’s also a style question. Steel shakers evoke dining cars and Art Deco penthouses. Maybe the ideal is the bullet-shaped shaker from the 1930s, which would hold about five martinis with ice and has an internal strainer. I also accept glass pitchers – blown glass, not cut glass – which evoke the drinks’ cart.’

  I told Voltz that in the early 1930s, especially in the year after Prohibition ended, the cocktail shaker became the most popular Christmas gift in the US, but I then felt compelled to add, ‘While I am relieved by your remarks about blown glass and the stainless steel shaker – I agree about the achieved coldness of the stainless steel and the bullet-shaped shaker, although I would personally prefer a dial-a-drink cocktail shaker where you can find the recipe of different great 1920s cocktails such as a Gin Ricky or Side Car by turning the barrel of the shaker to the desired drink – I am, however, unsettled by your reference to a drinks’ cart. A tray, yes, a butler’s table, yes, but a drinks’ cart?!’

  I told him that when I was growing up my family used what was called a traymobile – known in some places as an autotray – a small double-level table, on casters, in my home used for serving tea at every meal, but which could have been used for serving drinks had drinks ever been served in my home. My mother always served the tea. One model that I’ve seen has a tray with handles inset as the top shelf which can be removed by its handles when the traymobile has arrived at its destination.

  I said that for the serving of the martini, it was my opinion that the plain, round, metal bar tray is surely enough (a tray, along with the cup, is another artefact sculpted from the outstretched human hands – the two human hands were the first tray). The tray should not carry advertising, especially not antique advertising.

  I explained to Voltz that the problem with the drinks’ cart was that it somehow over-elaborated the presentation of the martini. The drinks’ cart usually over time comes to be a display of expensive and exotic drinks and also gathers drinking gadgets and bar novelties.

  ‘I enjoy the display of all the liquors and beers but only in a public cocktail bar as an illustration of choice and abundance and colour and shape and possibility; as a matter of fact, I think this backlit display is the glory of the good bar and it is sometimes a delight to be, as the American poet John Berryman says, “lost in the forest of bottles”.

  ‘But at home the martini must be granted its place as a pedigree drink. It detracts from the dignified simplicity of the martini to serve the martini from an array of miscellaneous bottles on a drinks’ trolley, that is, presenting it as just another drink among many. The martini needs a clear stage. That’s all I’m saying.’

  In the Algonquin bar one night I returned to the question of the drinks’ cart and told Voltz that designers refer to the drinks’ cart as ‘an accent piece’, that is, a distinctive feature of the room, something that calls attention to itself. ‘Which is also a black mark against it. I am not wanting to be difficult about all this but it seems that we resolve the matter of the metal shaker and the glass pitcher only to be disturbed by another issue – the cart.’

  Voltz replied patiently, ‘The proper drinkers’ drinks’ cart is never for show and never stocked with fancy liquors. The owner of a proper drinks’ cart is an aesthetically serious person and has no time – nor, especially, space – to waste on frivolous gadgets and undrunk exotic gift bottles.

  ‘A drinks’ cart usually contains the drinker’s libation and the glasses that match it and that’s all. For instance, straight bourbon drinkers would never bother with highball glasses on their drinks’ cart.

  ‘If I recall correctly, all James Stewart’s lovelorn artist pal had on her drinks’ cart in Vertigo was a bottle of Scotch and a few cafeteria-style water glasses. That is correct style.

  ‘A drinks’ cart would sit in your office or living room, preferably under a window. On the bottom shelf of the cart would be a silver ice bucket, engraved with your initials, which can be carried to the fridge, filled with ice, and then ret
urned to the top shelf of the drinks’ cart where there would always be room for it. Even if ice is not required it should be there.

  ‘There would be a glass pitcher with a long brass spoon. And there would be the bottom half of a steel martini shaker, its top long lost.’

  He went on to say that the cocktail cabinet was another matter. ‘It is the cocktail cabinet which is the domain of the pointless, showy and silly, along with these “dens” or “rathskellers” that men often create. They’re more like altars to a style of masculinity – they belong to another aesthetic and to a certain dumb “novelty” humour. They contain gift liquors, liquors in funny bottles – in the shape, say, of a guitar – liquors stolen from airplanes, liquors from exotic countries and in odd colours. Themes are common: gambling, golf, fishing and horse racing imagery often appear printed on novelty glasses. Also, there may be an ashtray from Florida with a sail-fish on it and there may be a table lamp in the shape of a streetlamp with a drunk leaning up against it that sings “How Dry I Am” when switched on.’

  I said to Voltz, ‘I know what you mean by the den bar. But to return to your description of your model drinks’ cart, it concerns me still. I see in my mind those faux wheels on the cart which worry me. In fact, it is the pointless wheels which worry me most. Surely the drinks’ cart, if it is a cart, should be truly mobile in the same way that a wheelbarrow or traymobile is mobile. Not fraudulently mobile. The wheels on drinks’ carts these days are no longer just castors, the wheels now are large, silly imitation wheels sometimes with spokes, imitating wagon wheels. And, anyhow, you can’t get a drinks’ cart up and down stairs or steps, wheels or no wheels. If it isn’t mobile then it shouldn’t have wheels. The wheels contravene the principles of functional modernism, surely?’

  I also raised the drinks’ cart question with my friend Matt and told him of Voltz’s vexing position. He said, ‘John Birmingham has such a cart in his loungeroom over at Bondi, twin-shelfed with, if memory serves, four wheels. From my observations, the cart has never been moved, thus bringing into question your point about the purpose of wheels and the functionality of the cart itself.

  ‘His cart has stainless steel framing and mirrored shelves. This would suggest that somewhere along the line this range of cart was manufactured with the “mobile cocktail cabinet” idea in mind, a focal point in the room, a little window, if you like, for grander aspirations and sophisticated yearnings – what you would call an “accent piece”.

  ‘I might add my father had one of Voltz’s den-style bars in the 70s, and the sign behind it read “I allus has one at eleven”.

  ‘In its favour, it has to be said that at least the drinks’ trolley announces to the world that we like a bit of a tipple and we’re perfectly happy for that notion to be asserted in our home furnishings.’

  I told Matt that his observations about the drinks’ trolley and aspirations and it being an ‘announcement’ were very pertinent. I told him that in the Victorian period in England the sideboard became such an announcement in many homes although before that the aristocracy used opulent sideboards for display sometimes including a built-in wine cooler. It was a small stage upon which the householder’s silver was displayed and upon which expensive dishes were served.

  I passed Matt’s considerations on to Voltz, again expressing my concern about the useless wheels on the cart. Voltz replied, ‘Need I remind you of why there are buttons on the sleeve of your jacket? Frederick the Great put them there to discourage his men from wiping their noses on their sleeves while on parade. In the same way, the wheels of the drinks’ cart have no “memory” of the reason they were put there. Wheels are not an issue.’

  I said that I failed to see how three or four buttons would stop a determined soldier on parade from wiping his nose on his sleeve. ‘You just wipe it on the other side of the jacket – try it.’

  Voltz came back and said, ‘That is not my point.’

  I was determined to resolve this dispute and investigate the origins of the drinks’ trolley.

  Through the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, I was able to track down one of the designers of the original 1930s drinks’ trolleys, the Hungarian designer Susan Kozma, now in her nineties. She designed the famous Kozma drinks’ trolley, one of the first. Her Kozma drinks’ trolley is now on display in the V and A.

  I explained to her my worries about the wheels and Voltz’s lack of concern.

  ‘You and your friend Voltz are both wrong about the wheels,’ she said. ‘But you are the more wrong. When I designed my drinks’ trolley for the Schreibers in Budapest in 1938 it was part of the living-room furniture which I designed for them.

  ‘The living room had a divan, chairs, and this drinks’ trolley and a number of built-in pieces of furniture. In keeping with modernist principles of the times, that which was not built-in was made to be easily moved, so the room was open and flexible – you could rearrange the room easily according to what was happening in it that day. If the room was to be used for cocktails you could move furniture to make an appropriate space and so on. Do you follow me?’ she said, sternly.

  Susan Kozma’s drinks’ trolley from 1938 is a stylish, large box on wheels with a chrome handlebar for pushing it. Nothing of its contents were displayed. When opened, two half-sections of the box swung out on hinges to reveal shelves and bottles and glasses – in fact, it was a mobile cocktail cabinet.

  I was chastened by Susan Kozma’s judgement. However, it is my experience that rooms once arranged tend to stay arranged, although I did not have the courage to say this to her. Years go by and very little is ever changed. People may refurbish once or twice in a lifetime. They rarely change their wall paintings. People seem to like things to stay the way they are although, sadly, it means over time they no longer see their rooms.

  One of the nice results of Miss Kozma’s rebuke was that I came to see that while the wheels on the drinks’ cart very quickly lose their memory, the forgotten wheels may dream – I like to think that now they sit there dreaming of when they were both mobile and chic in the fashionable rooms of pre-war Budapest, Paris and Berlin.

  Recently, Voltz wrote, saying, ‘I recalled your defence of the simple drinks’ tray last week when I attended Noël Coward’s Private Lives on Broadway as the guest of a Hollywood bigwig I know. Afterwards, we had drinks in Alan Rickman’s dressing room with the cast and a few of his friends. It was very Noël Cowardish and I espied a martini shaker on a drinks’ tray (just a tray, alas) with glasses on it sitting by his dressing table. I complimented him on the appropriateness of having a martini shaker in his dressing room during a Noël Coward production, but he dismissed it with a shrug and said it was a gift. He served white wine.

  ‘We had martinis afterwards in oakey bars on the Upper East Side. There’s still civilisation in this rotten world.’

  Again, a few months after the controversy of the drinks’ cart, Voltz said to me in the bar of the White Horse, ‘I was watching a Fred Astaire movie last night, The Pleasure of His Company – only worth watching for the 1960s furnishings. Especially of interest: a top-opening drinks’ cabinet, as distinct from the cupboard-style cocktail cabinet. It resembled a stereo cabinet: the lid opens up (there may be a mirror on the underside of it, there may be utensils clipped there) and you have to reach inside to get the bottles and glasses. A nice alternative to the drinks’ cart with the advantage that its contents are not displayed. In that way, it resembles the 1938 drinks’ trolley. And, by the way, in the script of The Big Sleep: “Norris enters, pushing a teawagon bearing decanter, siphon, initialled ice bucket”.

  ‘You are right about that, at least; evidently in the 1940s a bar cart was an adapted teawagon. Your mother used the traymobile correctly.’

  One of the things I like about Voltz is that he never gives up.

  A New Drinks’ Trolley

  ‘Dear Matt, Today I purchased my first drinks’ trolley and have equipped it pretty much to your specifications. It is stainless steel and fro
sted glass, two shelves with a wine rack at the bottom, for, say, six bottles – I never have had more than six bottles in my life at any given time. It has a handle to push it. It is where Art Nouveau meets Art Deco, geometry meets organic image: that is, the sides of the trolley are three bands of three curving parallel metal rods equally spaced. It is on casters.

  ‘I push it around my apartment although I have yet to “entertain” anyone with it. At present it has a bottle of half-drunk Shiraz, a full bottle of JD, a measuring cup given to me by my three best graduate students from Texas (who in God’s name measures drinks?), a bottle of orange bitters from you, and a champagne resealer (who ever needs to reseal champagne?).’

  Matt replied, ‘On the purchase of a trolley: have you purchased the trolley for the aesthetics of the trolley itself or is it a “nesting” urge you may now be experiencing? Having purchased the trolley, it now must have a home. You have committed the trolley to your environment which is now the trolley’s “turf”.

  ‘Although I know you have a few select pieces of fine furniture in your life, which orbit you like moons, and perhaps the trolley has now been installed in that firmament. Nevertheless, by virtue of purchase it has now become a part of the texture that is you. Are you prepared for this?

  ‘On the pushing around of the trolley in the absence of guests: I think this is entirely legitimate and in some way sends a line across time and space back to the yum cha maids and perhaps a deep desire you have to serve, to present goods and bounty and beautiful things to other people. Which, naturally, is one of the functions of writing.

  ‘Perhaps we push drinks’ trolleys all our lives in order to please and illuminate. Solo trolley pushing in the privacy of one’s home is surely a way of revelling in the craft and refreshing what is so intrinsic to us, a secret celebration.